‘The Leftovers’ Recap: Trying to Explain What Cannot Be Explained

Season 1, Episode 1 “Dogs are just animals, man. They see something like that, and they just snap. All bets are off right there. No more chasing sticks. …They just go primal, man. Same thing’s going to happen to us, it’s just taking longer.”

These words come halfway through the premiere of HBO’s “The Leftovers,” and they feel like an overture for the series itself, a grim, occasionally goofy melodrama about the funny and very-not-funny ways that people respond to trauma and loss. A teenager burying a dead dog notes that his town’s canine population “went nuts” after the Rapture-like events that serve as this show’s theology-tinged backdrop. The humans, we are not surprised to learn, are going nuts, too.

One day, 2 percent of the Earth’s population abruptly disappears. Spouses and children are gone; so are the pope, Shaquille O’Neal and, peculiarly, Gary Busey, along with unknown millions of everyday sinners whose worthiness for being summoned by God seems suspect.

This is “The Twilight Zone” by way of J. J. Abrams: a morally provocative, fantastical premise played out through a well-coiffed cast of actors with “Gossip Girl”-caliber good looks. The setting is an Anytown, U.S.A., by the name of Mapleton, N.Y., and I found myself thinking of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” a “Twilight Zone” episode where law-abiding citizens turn violently against one another after unexplained phenomena — flashing lights, self-starting cars – bedevil their neighborhood. The clear lesson, of course, was that the monsters are in ourselves. Faced with the unexplainable, the characters in “The Leftovers” waste little time proving that premise, though as the Times television critic Alessandra Stanley says in her review, “The premiere withholds as much as it reveals.”

The series is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta, who specializes in skewering suburbanites’ unhappy lives. Squint, and you can see Kevin Garvey, the protagonist, as a Cheever-esque victim of middle-age ennui; his estranged wife, Laurie, as a castaway from a mediocre marriage; their troubled daughter, Jill, as the latchkey kid gone to seed.

That the domestic drama unfolds on a supernatural stage amps up the stakes and injects an eeriness into the proceedings. No one knows how or why the Sudden Departure happened; a glimpse of a congressional hearing shows scientists and politicians alike at a loss. “God sat this one out,” one grouses.

The vanishing itself is glimpsed only at the episode’s start, mostly in the form of frightened 911 calls against a black screen. The device resembles the opening of “Zero Dark Thirty” — emergency workers calling in the World Trade Center attacks — and I doubt it’s unintentional; another scene features two people falling from a building, one of several callbacks to the cataclysm we faced in our own world.

Unmoored, the characters look for solace. Garvey, played by Justin Theroux, is yet another HBO paterfamilias with a soft spot for animals, reserving his deepest ire for the strange man who keeps shooting Mapleton’s dogs. Garvey’s son, Tom (Chris Zylka), has run off with a survivalist-style cult, led by a snake-oil healer named Wayne who charges premium rates to comfort the troubled. A congressman seeking Wayne’s counsel hands Tom an envelope filled with cash — even after the Rapture, it seems, the wealthy and well-connected still want to buy their way to happiness.

Mapleton’s teenagers, including Tom’s sister Jill (Margaret Qualley), seem more sullen than the usual specimen, indulging in hedonistic games that involve branding skin with a red-hot fork. Jill claims to be untroubled by the Sudden Departure, although a poster on her bedroom door features a band called the Evaporators.

Laurie, played by Amy Brenneman, has taken a vow of silence to join up with an ascetic cult, whose members wear white, smoke cigarettes, and silently stalk the people of Mapleton, watching them like smug existentialists dragging on Gauloises. (It’s no surprise that Garvey is spotted at one point perusing a paperback of Camus’ “The Stranger.”)

When the mayor plans a parade for the anniversary of the vanishing, dubbing it Heroes’ Day, Garvey warns that Laurie’s cult, the Guilty Remnant, will disrupt and cause trouble. “Everybody’s ready to feel better,” the mayor insists.

It’s hard, of course, to sweep this sort of thing under the rug. The parade is earnest but insufficient, a community’s feeble attempt to cope with forces beyond its grasp. The Guilty Remnant arrives with signs that read, “Stop Wasting Your Breath.” Garvey, injured in the ensuing riot, pleads with Laurie the next day to return to him and their children. She turns away.

“The Leftovers” puts rational people in irrational circumstances, and lets the layers of civilization slowly unpeel. At episode’s end, Garvey, the only character who has not snapped, has his trigger moment: on a moonlit street, drunk and bloodied from the riot, he watches a deer being torn apart by wild dogs. A man appears, the dog-killer Garvey had been chasing. This time, Garvey grabs his gun and starts firing, too.

“They go primal, man.”

This series could be one long, strange trip.

Were you intrigued or put off by the episode’s grim plot and unrelenting piano soundtrack? The sprawling cast and sci-fi backdrop promises many narrative possibilities, but are you prepared to devote 10 hours to a study in extreme grief? I am curious if the show will add more playful elements or move deeper into the dark worlds portended by the premiere.